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The excuse for my visit to Paris was SmartCity, a conference organized in the frame of the festival Emergences. Emergences is an 'international festival of electronic cultures and new art forms'. However, one must accept that in a city like Paris the word 'international' doesn't necessarily that tacit rules will be respected and that the activities and conferences will be held in any other language than french. That's probably why i enjoyed the event so much. While both the issues discussed and the quality of the speakers invited to the panels were definitely of international relevance, the festival had a homely feeling with an audience ready to participate and dialog, un-refrained as they were by any lack of knowledge of the ubiquitous english.
The conference focused on urban activism and artistic interventions in public space, a theme which offered a splendid contrast with the venue of the conference: the very chichi Maison Internationale at the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris.
There were some good moments but the one that got me glued to my seat, pen in the hand and eyes on the screen was the presentation of mOmentoMoNUMENTO, a joint project by Brazilian collective Coloco & French experimental architects of Exyzt whose pavilion at the Venice architecture biennale of 2006 i had enjoyed so much. Exyzt's works engage mostly with temporary interventions, ephemeral constructions and the presence of diversity in urban space. They have recently joined forces with Coloco to submit to the institution Cultures France a project that will be part of the official programme of the French Year in Brazil (February-July 2009).
The final project stems from a research started in 2001 by Coloco.
The desire of these people is to live in the center of the city, close to the services. They organize the general functioning of the building: bathroom and garden for the collectivity are installed, trash collection is organized, spaces on ground levels are reserved for the elderly, etc. Sometimes, the dwellers are kicked out of the building but in some cases, they manage to reach an agreement with city officials (conscious that the abandon of the center of a city for the suburbs is a growing problem) and their dwelling become permanent and 'legitimate'. Coloco came to consider that these inhabited skeletons of buildings give way to an unexpected collaboration between the construction industry and invention prompted by necessity. This idea is at the origin of the skeleton dwellings: a safe and assembled structure is supplied to a group of inhabitants-builders. It can be improved according to the needs and resources of its occupants, who contribute their labor, advised by professionals.
The skeleton dwellings derive from a logic of opportunity, being easily inserted in dense urban areas and diversifying the supply of low-cost urban housing.
Meanwhile, Exyzt is also working on the rehabilitation of disused spaces and on alternative and cheap forms of dwellings. A first project they presented is République Ephémère where 450 architectural students from Europe were given some rudimentary tools and materials to organize for 2 weeks their life as a big community in the enclosed space of the two wharehouses? The challenge took the form of a one-to-one scale construction game that doubled as a laboratory of architectural and social research. The conceptor team built the main collective equipment (kitchen, washrooms, a hotel) beforehand. The rest would be a village autoconstructed and automanaged by its inhabitants.
Each student was untrusted with a survival kit, including a construction manual and security instructions, and a defined quantity of scaffolding and textiles. Geometrical problems could arise, as this amount of scaffolding, sufficient to build one cubic room could then be combined with others: for example, 2 kits put together could give rise to 3 dwellings. Video: The affinities and exchanges between the participants were gradually translated into architectural terms. More complex, personalized structures were developed over time. The implantation looked like a cross between an organic. medieval village and a refugee camp. It kept transforming itself, not only on the level of the individual sphere, but also on the level of the collective organization. The second project Exyzt spotlighted was an intervention inside and outside of the Palast der Republik, a gigantic relic of the communist era, now demolished and about to be replaced by the (very tacky imho) reconstruction of its predecessor, the Berlin Stadtschloss.
Under the menace of a demolition act, Raumlabor, one of the most brilliant group on the German architecture scene, decided to occupy and open the monument to the public. They called Exyzt to give them a helping hand. Der Berg (in german: the mountain) is an artificial mountain, a surrealist architectural performance built to react to the absurdity of making a tabula rasa of a part of Berlin's history in order to build the replica of a long disappeared building. This collaboration resulted in a 20 meters high triangulated structure made out of scaffolding and fiber glass textile. The installation invaded the theater, while another team made it spread through the roof and onto the front porch of the building. Der Berg became a monument inside a monument. Movie: After this introduction, Exyzt and Coloco focused on mOmentoMoNUMENTO, the project they are working on for the official programme of the French Year in Brazil (February-July 2009). The idea is to follow on the steps of the French tradition to 'offer' monuments to foreign countries (think of the Statue of Liberty). This monument, however, is already on site. Well, sort of. The architects have obtained the help of the city of Sao Paulo to spot one of the many skeletons that have been standing for years in the city center, waiting to be reconquered by Exyzt and Coloco.
The building they've set their sight on was built in 1965. It is the first building with a facade entirely made of glass. Occupied at some point by the federal police it has now been left to decay. The main problem the architect have to solve is that living inside the building is almost un-conceivable without air conditioning which has been dismantled in the meantime. The whole electrical setting has to be re-installed as well (especially if one wants to have access to the top floor by lift.) The project responds to Sao Paulo government's desire to find new solutions that will inject life back into the center of the city: inhabitants have moved to the edge of the city, leaving many abandoned buildings and a thick infrastructure of roads behind them. The building is left at the disposal of the architects for one year. If at the end of the project, the result is deemed good enough by the city, it could become a space left permanently occupied by cultural organizations, art galleries, artists residencies, etc. Exyzt and Coloco want to make the rooftop (originally planned as a landing spot for helicopters) accessible to the public. The project is currently self-funded. Any help and feedback would be most welcome. Related: Global Cities, The Morrinho Project at the Venice Biennale and Juan Freire - From the Analogue Commons to the New Hybrid Public Spaces. |
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's been a long Summer and i spent it with the usual heap of magazines. Here's some of the best that fell into my hands:
In a nutshell and in the words of the editors: Our society seems to be locked into a position in which the user's and voter's choices determine how we shall live in the future. A disturbing collective urban life in a giant Big Brother House looms, a material and social world in which sensationalistic media and its commercial translation dominate. Our sense of what is real and what is quality is on the verge of collapse. The practice and education of the engineers of this society is determined by short-term effect instead of long-term social responsibility. Culture becomes little more than a market, politics its façade and the city its stage. Instead of reviving old school high modernist social engineering or claiming the need for an intellectual junta, we solicit new forms of social engineering. Where shall this lead? The wide variety of articles in Volume is brilliant: the potential of gaming to affect architecture with the particular case of SimCity and how it has changed urban planning; a nice essay details a campaign by the Zimbabwean government to forcibly clear slum areas across the country; another shows that the French government is not necessarily much more clever when it comes to dealing with problems arising in 'slums and slabs' areas; a photo gallery about 20th century utopian architecture (with many images that evoke Dubai btw); the obligatory article about Chinese cities adorned with never-gonna-be-tired-of-those spectacular images, etc. Forecast: Nozone X, edited by Nicholas Blechman, principal of Knickerbocker Design in New York City and art director of the New York Times Book Review (Amazon USA and UK.)
Publisher Princeton Architectural Press says: UN reports and newspaper articles are illustrated with dry charts and graphs predicting technological, economic, and ecological transformations that are already dramatically altering the way we live. Forecast revisualizes these abstractions about everything from our environment to our waistlines, from the stock market to the Middle East through the eyes of cartoonists and graphic designers who have made comics with a conscience: Ward Sutton imagines a nation divided into a red and a blue zone; Paula Scher maps out the Northern Hemisphere of 2100; Elizabeth Amon interviews New Yorker journalist Elizabeth Kolbert on global warming; and Tom Tomorrow looks back on the legacy of Bush-Cheney. Ultimately, Forecast is an optimistic book: using humor, it encourages all of us to take responsibility for predictions of the future and to take action to affect change. Forecast is the 10th installment of Nozone, a politically-engaged graphic design and comics zine, founded by Blechman in 1990. Published as an independent and zero-profit venture, Nozone features the work of talented graphic designers and cartoonists, spot-on themes, and an abrasive take on contemporary events. The theme of this edition is our increasingly unsteady and uncertain future. The one of the first edition, back in 1990, was pollution and on its cover was a man wearing a gas mask too. There's another gas mask guy on the current cover. The message is clear: 20 years on, the state of our blue planet is still a cause of concern. The Morning News has a gallery of some of the drawings (not the best ones i'm afraid) you'll find in the magazine.
a minima is a great compact mag about contemporary art and in particular new media art, the magazine follows a methodology which resembles that of scientific magazines: the artists themselves write about their work, the editors leave the text untouched and add photos and graphics. Issue number 24 features a few pearls: Jose Luis de Vicente and Irma Vila discuss their Atlas of Electromagnetic Space, Marta de Menezes shares her experience of bringing artistic creation inside scientific research laboratories, like she did with Decon, a project for which she used biotechnology to create Mondrian-like paintings, Diane Gromala gives the gore details but also the motivation behind The Meatbook, Ulla Taipale from Capsula presents Curated Expeditions, an invitation to experience earthly phenomena through artistic exploration, Geert Lovink writes about blogging as a 'nihilist impulse', there's also a text about Íñigo Bilbao's artistic experiments with biomedical images and an essay by Jonah Lehrer who advocates that science should find a place for art. There are many more articles. A few of them are only available in spanish but most are publish both in english and spanish. You can order the bi-monthly magazine by contacting aminima at aminima dot net. But the best would be to subscribe, right?
The current issue of Neural paper mag is devoted to games. There's even colours inside and a new design. Exhibition reports, DVD, music, book reviews, artists interviews, all the usual crunchy media snacks. I guess i could do a lengthier paragraph about the magazine but that would be an insult to you, dear readers, cuz you are already subscribed, aren't you?
The latest issue of Cluster is called Transmitting Architecture, it's been created in collaboration with the World Congress of Architecture 2008 and it is very very good. Take my word for it (sorry, too tired to keep on blogging) or check out the online version of a few articles published in the magazine. Published both in english and italian. |
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I first heard about the Swiss Architecture Museum one month ago while i was visiting the Contemporary Art Space in Castellon. Reactivate!, the exhibition which closed yesterday had in fact been curated by the SAM. That day, i made a mental note to add a ride to Basel in Switzerland to the agenda. Architecture-wise the trip started really well. I found a nice hotel which happened to have the most striking parking space i had ever seen:
But as far as the SAM is concerned the building itself looks nothing short of ordinary. The programme and the design of the exhibitions, however, are outstanding. Apart maybe from the Netherlands Architecture Institute, i can't think of any other place which curates and presents such stimulating and intelligent exhibitions dedicated to architecture. The one currently on view should give you an idea of what i mean.
Curated by Oliver Domeisen and Francesca Ferguson, Re-Sampling Ornament comes exactly 100 years after Adolf Loos wrote Ornament and Crime, an essay which claimed that ornamentation of objects and architecture was a waste of time and a sure way to make buildings obsolete. Re-sampling Ornament takes a first step towards tracing its re-emergence at the heart of architectural practice.
The exhibition demonstrates how the development of construction and manufacturing processes (think 3D computer modelling, rapid prototyping, CNC milling, laser cutting, etc.) have enabled the rise of a new culture of ornament. One which is not only innovative and aesthetically stunning but also economically viable. Domeisen's research into the history and contemporary application of ornament in architecture has helped articulate the exhibition around associations and groupings that can identify vital traces of ornament in current practice, delineate its boundaries, and place it into a historical perspective. A crystal clear example of how much some of the contemporary high-tech ornaments allude to past experiments is Evan Douglis Studio's Helioscopes which gives new twists and turns to the 18th century French Rococo style.
Computer-aided design allows him to push to the extreme the organic forms and artifices of an invasive ceiling.
Equally ingenious and astonishing is the facade of the Gantenbein Winery, Fläsch. Bearth & Deplazes Architects designed the project, and invited Gromazio & Kohler to create its façade. An innovative robotic production method, developed by Gromazio & Kohler at the ETH in Zuerich, ordered the 20,000 bricks according to programmed parameters, at the desired angle and at the exact prescribed intervals. Seen from afar, the bricks look like pixels, each of them reflects light differently and plays with the viewer's location and the position of the sun over the course of the day. Besides, the masonry acts as a temperature buffer, filtering the sunlight and allowing daylight to enter the hall through the gaps between the bricks.
Nieto Sobejano Architects have worked in close collaboration with realities:united (quick note: there is a great interview of the Berlin-based architects in BauNetz) to design the spectacular facade of the Espacio de Creación Artística Contemporánea, a new Centre for Contemporary Art in Cordoba, Spain (completion in 2009). They created a 'media façade': the building is cloaked with a semi-transparent membrane of computer-controlled neon lamps that enable the programming and screening of pixellated film sequences. The main facade will act as a dynamic surface that reveals the Center's activities to its urban surroundings and plays with perception. By day the facade, made of concrete panels can be enjoyed for its tactile beauty, by night it turns into a communication instrument made of over 1300 elements of various size.
The East Beach Cafe, by Thomas Heatherwick Studio (you might remember his Rolling Bridge), is a long, thin building without flat, 2D façades. The building is sliced diagonally into rusted and oiled steel ribbons which wrap up and over the building:
Danfoss Universe is a 5.5 hectar science museum park in Nordborg, Denmark. J. Mayer H. designed its most striking area, the Cumulus exhibition building (curiosity center) takes its name from the almost organic and cloud-like roof silhouette, repeated in the 'Food Factory', aka the cafeteria. The building exemplifies a trend where ornament is not just covering a construction but is part and parcel of its structure.
Francis Soler's work for the French Ministry of Culture and Communication is one of my favourite sights in Paris. The architect unified two existing buildings which each came with a different architectural style by wrapping them in a continuous mesh of steel lace. More images.
That was just a quick overview of a small number of the projects i discovered at the Museum. If you can't make it to Basel, the Swiss Architecture Museum has published Re-sampling Ornament, a remarkable catalog that explores with more depth the topic and details each of the projects exhibited during the exhibition.
All my images. On view until September 21 at the Swiss Architecture Museum in Basel, Switzerland.
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I liked 'The Rest of Now', the Bolzano section of the Manifesta biennale so much that i fear that i'll end up forgetting about the other exhibitions i saw at the Biennale this week. Two of the participating artists/architects took very literally the questions put forward by The Raqs Media Collective who curated the exhibition: What gets left behind when everything is taken away? What can be retrieved, and what can be remembered? How can the residual become the engine of meaning? Over time, parasitic micro-organisms such as cyanobacterias and the Cladosporium genus of fungi, have occupied and taken over the walls of the abandoned Alumix factory. The restoration of the ex-factory means that the building is loosing its value as habitat for the organisms.
Architects Stangeland and Kropf decided to engage with this transitional state. The Naked Garden is generated by the mediation of different modes: biological propagation, mathematical abstraction and technological execution. A robot, programmed with the rules by which the fungi grow, engraves and perforates the wall already inhabited by fungi, thereby allowing light, water and wind to enter and to facilitate the basic conditions of life.
Jorge Otero-Pailos is an architect and theorist specialized in experimental forms of preservation. His contribution to Manifesta is The Ethics of Dust, an installation intended to preserve pollution and the dust that has to be swept away from the building during the renovation process. Pollution has negative connotation. Yet, it can tell fascinating stories about our social, cultural and industrial past.
During two weeks, Otero-Pailos and his team of architectural conservators coated in latex an entire wall of the a wall inside the ex-Alumix factory in order to trap the dust and any trace of air pollution that have accumulated over decades. The architect then peeled the latex off, displaying it like a semi-transparent and precious shroud.
Following the tradition of nineteenth-century archeologists, who made plaster casts of the world's monuments so that European academics could study the architecture of distant cultures, Otero-Pailos suggests a new way of looking at architecture and our history. Manifesta 7 - the European Biennial of Contemporary Art runs until November 2, 2008 in Trento, Fortezza, Rovereto and Bolzano. |
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As i blogged the other day, the Bolzano segment of Manifesta 7 exhibition is located in a disused aluminium factory by the Dolomites mountains. The show is called The Rest of Now and words fail me to express how consistent, intelligent and thought-provoking it is.
The curators, Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula & Shuddhabrata Sengupta from Raqs Media Collective, took as a point of departure for their reflection the abandoned industrial site and the questions its 'after-life' raises, they then enlarged the scope of the discussion: What gets left behind when everything is taken away? What can be retrieved, and what can be remembered? How can the residual become the engine of meaning? They invited artists but also a few practitioners whose work wouldn't be defined as art to participate to the conversation. I'll focus on a couple of them in this post. David Adjaye is one of the most famous and oh! so talented architects from England. One who, although he collaborated with Olafur Eliasson to create the Your Black Horizon installation at the Venice Biennale in 2005, has never tried to confuse his work with one of an artist (like some architects like to do these days)
His contribution to the Manifesta biennial is Europolis, a beautifully crafted glass and metal foil panel that raises questions such as 'What if Europe was condensed into one piece and combined as one cell? What would be left behind as residue?'
Adjaye extracted information from the capital cities of the European Union and condensed it into a single entity. The sum of many European cities doesn't make a European city. These have not been planned; they have evolved over time, through history and war, development, destruction, mixing, migration and changing populations. Adjaye's work evokes the idea of the city as phenomenon. Its organic form contains all the information about those cities from which it is drawn: material texture, population, time, scale and occupation.
The other rabbit in Manifesta's magic hat is Piratbyrån (The Bureau of Piracy) who came all the way down from Stockholm to Italy in an old bus. Piratbyrån is best known as the initiator of The Pirate Bay, the world's largest bit torrent tracker and the subject of a controversial court case.
The journey doubled as a workshop whose aim was the formulation of a new, collaborative statement based on the group's experiences of the recent Scandinavian conflicts over copyright. The bus was left behind as part of the exhibition, along with the documentation of Piratbyrån's work. I admire the Biennale for having the guts to support the project in a country whose government has recently decided to censor The Pirate Bay. So far the move has been unsuccessful. I guess that among the worries of the head of State is also the suspicion that we'll use the file-sharing website to enthusiastically download his upcoming CD of Christmas songs.
Unfortunately (for me cuz it means i can't download the Commissario Montalbano), Colombo-BT is still blocked due to the same measure. Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak: "It kinda shows that we're more than just a site, that we're an idea, and that we're art in ourselves. As I've said many times before, we see The Pirate Bay as some sort of ongoing art project/performance."
There's of course a torrent of TPB's road movie. Manifesta, the itinerant European Biennial of Contemporary Art is hosted this year by the Trentino - South Tyrol Region. It runs until November 2, 2008. |
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Established in 1933 in the austere and elegant Palazzo dell'Arte designed by architect Giovanni Muzio, the Milan Triennale regularly hosts some impressive design, art and architecture exhibitions of the 20th century.
Launched in the wake of the Stuttgart Weissenhof --an estate of working class dwelling which was built in Stuttgart in 1927, the opening exhibition at the Palazzo back in 1933 was dedicated to the theme of housing. One of the Triennale's Summer exhibitions is revisiting the theme of affordable housing under a more contemporary side. Casa per tutti is pressing architects to give their attention to a theme that was central in the inter-war and post-WW2 reconstruction periods and is once again crucial in the current crisis of the postmodern metropolis.
The Milan exhibition is one of the many i've seen on a topic which is proving quite popular these days (only in Milan i have visited two shows related to the same issue: Alternative Living Strategies and Lucy + Jorge Orta's Antarctica expedition). The Italian Pavilion of the Architecture Biennale in Venice (September 14th to November 23rd 2008), entitled HOUSING ITALY. 12 Projects for Inhabiting and Re-inhabiting the City, will be concerned with a similar theme. In spite of its weaknesses (it's a bit confusing, poorly distributed in space, lacking in strong focus), the Milan show makes pertinent points, displays some fascinating projects and draws meaningful parallels between past works and contemporary prototypes. Social housing today faces new challenges: the fragmentation of societies, waves of migration and their impact on local cultures, an increase in mobility, the awareness of the limited nature of resources, the need for higher compatibility between building and nature, and the necessity to "invent" more flexible and ephemeral spaces that would better respond to the needs and cultures of their users.
In CASA PER TUTTI, past examples of the approach are exhibited side by side with a wide range of contemporary dwelling solutions, from emergency housing to self-built houses, houses for specific users (student housing, hostels for girls, nomads' houses, workers' housing, the wearable house etc.), including research by artists who have put this issue at the centre of their work.
Anything by Vito Acconci is bound to get all my attention so i'll kick of the list of projects i most liked with Umbruffla. Conceived by Studio Acconci, this is a new umbrella you could wrap yourself up in. Fix one end to your waist, the other to one wrist, so that both hands are free. Wearing it, you could dodge a passer-by, turn it windward and even welcome a companion under it with you. Umbruffla is made from two way mirrored mylar. From outside the surface is mirrored, so while you can see through from inside, you would be camouflaged by the reflections of the city which shimmers on you as you walk. The name of the object comes from English - 'ruffle'. When the object is closed, "the ruffles are gathered into a ruffle", but, when opened, "the ruffles unfold, fan out, spring out, into an umbruffla."
Massimiliano Fuksas, MVRDV, Jean Nouvel, Kengo Kuma, Alejandro Aravena, Cino Zucchi and other key architects were commissioned the building of a housing model which the Triennale exhibits in its garden.
One of these prototypes is Kengo Kuma's Umbrella House. Like Studio Acconci, the Japanese architect modified umbrellas but this time in order to build a fast, modular and cheap shelter. Zippers along the umbrellas outer edges are zipped together to create a shelter.
Oskar Leo Kaufmann's Carton House was an artistic proposal for an Art Biennale held in Turin a few years ago. The minimal house wasn't meant as an actual prototype for living on the cheap but as a way of giving visibility to the people who actually have to sleep in cardboard on the street. The Carton House is foldable, weights 12kg and measures 1.00×0.66×0.20m. Once unfold, the living space measures 2×1x1.75m. The Austrian architect also develops affordable and easy to mount prefab houses such as the System 3 House, that he designed together with Albert Rüf for MoMA's Home Delivery exhibition.
The project evokes earlier examples of ready-to-assemble dwellings such as Sears Roebuck's mail order houses.
The Casa Per Tutti exhibition was divided in a series of sections. The Micro/Macro one reflected on two apparently opposite but in reality complementary ways of envisioning the habitat: the tiny one-person living unit and the large-scale complex of urban building. The best example of Micro Macro is Le Corbuiser's prototype of the Maison Domino micro-house, which develops and becomes the repetitive element of the famous Macro-house Unité d'Habitation in Marseille. Contemporary examples of Micro-Houses include Atelier Van Lieshut, Andrea Zittel, the wearable houses of Kosuke Tsumura and Lucy Orta but also altro_studio's Inflatable House.
Like many post-Archigram inflatable projects, this clearly evokes the Cushicle. The structure clearly refers to a traditional house style. It is composed of three inflatable elements anchored on the ground by steel platforms, zipped together, and set in such a way as to prevent that water soaks into the walls. Once the length of the house has been determined, each module is concluded in non-inflatable plugging panels, that can contain a door or window as needed. These elements, which allow for the ventilation of the internal space, are characterized by a side zip closing system.
Some of the works, far from being designed as simple make-do for people whose lifestyle is on the margin of society, can actually confer them some dignity. See for example Baumraum's Tree Houses. At the other end of the spectrum are the macro buildings made of micro housing units which, unlike many of their predecessors, rise with so much grace and appeal on the urban landscape that they make us dream of a new sense of collective habitat. Examples are the 'Whale' installed by Cie on Amsterdam canals or the colourful blocks of MVRDV's Mirador in Madrid.
To those new paradigms of urban dwelling in massive structures can be added the more theoretical research of architectural studios like Dogma.
The Italian architects were showing an utopian concept called Stop-City, a city that develops vertically in an archipelago of dense urban island.
The project holds an ironic mirror to Archizoom's No Stop City , a 1969 concept that critiques the ideology of architectural modernism by pushing it to absurd limits. The city they envisioned had no boundaries either, but it grows horizontally, is artificially lit and air-conditioned. That was just a partial, subjective, quick and dirty overview of the show, there's tons more to learn and see over there. My images. Casa per Tutti is on view at the Triennale di Milano until September 14, 2008. And i just learned that if you visit the Triennale in August you'll be granted a free entry to all their exhibitions. Previous exhibitions seen at the Triennale: Fabrica - Gli Occhi Aperti, Beautiful Losers: : Contemporary Art and Street Culture. Related entries: Alternative Living Strategies, Lucy + Jorge Orta's Antarctica expedition, the Shellhouse, Several ways to wear a mosque, Urban Nomad Shelter, paraSITE shelters, the Homeless Vehicle, Design for "urban nomads", etc. |
